Thank you Wendell and Andrew! That makes a lot more sense. I  
understand the argument now of why you need entities at all!  
Unfortunately, the vendor still requires that these characters be  
substituted with their proper entity symbols. That being said, is  
there an easier way to substitute those characters other than  
manually or using a find/change routine to do so? Also, the one issue  
that I am running into is the fact that if I try to put an entity  
symbol into the file such as &test; when I process the file, it  
converts it to &test;. It's like it won't allow me to use the &  
symbol even when using it in the name of the entity. Whew, I'm tired!



<chad/>



Chad Chelius
AGI Training
cchelius@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


On Jul 3, 2006, at 1:51 PM, Wendell Piez wrote:



They're not mutually exclusive: you're making sense, but still  
might be missing the point. :-> It could be that the character is  
correct, except the interface you are using to inspect it (browser,  
editor or whatever) has no glyph to show the character, so it shows  
you a box. This doesn't necessarily mean the character has become a  
box character in the data; it could still be the correct character,  
just hard to see and hard to check for correctness.



In such a case an entity may be a more legible representation of  
the character, but as you can see there's also a price to be paid  
for demanding it. The ideal would be to use tools capable of  
showing you what the character actually is. In an imperfect world,  
requiring entities or numeric character references might indeed be  
a pragmatic way of evading the problem or the appearance of a  
problem. Whether it's worth the tradeoff is another question.



Cheers,
Wendell